An energy management control system capable of saving energy has become increasingly significant as the energy resources throughout the world become scarce gradually.
Generally, the energy management control system of the prior art employs the conventional electric automation technique in which the energy consumption management control is performed on individual energy consumption devices in a single object (such as malls, stores, hotels, office buildings, industrial premises), which belongs to the control of field level. If the manufacturers are different, the used management and energy-saving platforms are different as well. Consequently, the platforms may be incompatible mutually, and may lack communication among them. As such, no unitary platform can be formed to carry out the unitary energy consumption management control in a centralization manner for maximization of the energy saving.
U.S. TRIDIUM Corporation has firstly developed a unitary platform system for energy management, which can be compatible with other energy management platforms and can provide the reference data of the energy consumption for the user. However, the present inventor has found the following problems existing in this platform:
1. the system encounters the problems of lower processing speed and incapability of data protection when coping with a large amount of history data;
2. the system fails to perform a comprehensive energy statistics, analysis and management control in terms of energy factor, energy scenario, energy index, management system, energy consumption reference benchmark, energy performance, energy statistics, energy optimization and the like, and only the statistical results for the energy consumption are provided to the user. Thus, the user has to modify the field control mode in accordance with the statistical results by themselves thereby the optimal deployment of energy cannot be obtained.
Cloud computing is a kind of network technique that is developed in recent years, which distributes the computation task over a resource pond constituted by a substantial mount of computers, and enables various application systems to acquire computability, storage space and various software services according to individual demands. Each of the IT corporations, such as Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Amazon, etc., proposes its own cloud computing platform service based on cloud computing successively. The characteristics of the cloud computing can be summed up as below:
(1) Grand Scale
The scale of “cloud” is considerable. The cloud computing of Google, for example, holds more than 1 million servers, and the “cloud” of Amazon, IBM, Microsoft, Yahoo and the like holds several hundred thousands servers, respectively. Typically, the private cloud of an enterprise holds several hundreds and thousands servers; therefore, “cloud” is capable of imparting the unprecedented computability to the user.
(2) Virtualization
The cloud computing enables the user to acquire the application service by using any terminal at any location. The requested resource comes from the “cloud” rather than a fixed tangible entity. The application runs at some location within the “cloud”, and it is unnecessary for the user to know or worry about the specific location where the application runs. Any service for what we need, even including such a task as supercomputing, can be achieved through network service by only one laptop or one cellphone.
(3) High Reliability
The “cloud” adopts the measures such as fault-tolerance by multiple data copies, interchangeability of the computing nodes with the same structure to ensure the high reliability of service, that is, the cloud computing is more reliable than a local computer.
(4) Universality
The cloud computing does not aim at a particular application, and versatile applications can be constructed with the support of the “cloud”. Particularly, the same “cloud” can support the running of different applications at the same time.
(5) Highly Expandability
The scale of the “cloud” can be scaled up and down dynamically to meet the increased demand in the scale of applications and user.
(6) Servicing as Needed
The “cloud” is a huge resource pond, and the user can purchase in light of his/her need, wherein the cloud may be charged as tap water, electricity and gas.
(7) Extremely Inexpensive
The automatic centralized management of the “cloud” enables a substantial amount of corporations to be free from the cost of data center management that is increasingly high and the universality of the “cloud” increase the utilization rate of the resource compared with that of the conventional system greatly by virtue of the fact that the special fault-tolerance measures of the “cloud” make it possible to use the extremely inexpensive nodes to constitute the cloud. Accordingly, the user can benefit from the advantage of lower cost of the “cloud” sufficiently and the tasks, previously completed within several months at the expense of several tens of thousand dollars, can generally be accomplished within several days at the expense of several hundred dollars.